The Dandy
Pleasure for the Beautiful Body, Pain for the Beautiful Soul
From Beau Brummell to Quentin Crisp, Philip Mann examines the characteristics of dandies through history and the melancholic disposition that is an essential part of their nature It is a truth universally acknowledged that the origin of dandyism proper lies with George Bryan Brummell, known as Beau Brummell (1778–1840). Not only was he the first dandy, he also – a by-product of his dandyism – revolutionised male clothing and so became, in the words of Max Beerbohm, ‘the father of modern costume’ . Brummell replaced the silks and velvets worn by the aristocracy with wool, and returned the silhouette of male attire from the pear-shaped cut of the ancien régime to the proud proportions of classical antiquity. The period of Brummell’s influence did indeed coincide with the neoclassical moment. The excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum were relatively recent, and the new interest in antiquity inter alia led to a reappraisal of the physical ideal aspired to by the ancient Greeks, as might be admired in the figures of the Parthenon frieze and the Apollo Belvedere. Brummell took the existing clothes of the English country gentleman and refined them according to these rediscovered classical ideals. He thus invented the modern male suit still worn in the twenty-first century, not because all the components of Brummell’s costume were made, as is the custom today, from one cloth – this would only become the norm a hundred years later – but because of its unified abstraction of form in keeping with the Greek ideal. This proud achievement was arrived at by what to most would appear as a routine of back-breaking idleness. The Beau was cerebral even down to the character of 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
his beauty: contemporaries described his high forehead, his piercing eyes full of concentrated irony. Indeed, physical activity of any kind – which he found a nuisance at school and in the army – was anathema to him. In Brummell’s case, the corpus sanum of classical antiquity was cut from cloth. The earning of money he eschewed as belonging to the lowly and vulgar sphere. His rejection of any profitable occupation was a silent protest against useful and barbarised man. As the German philosopher Otto Mann pointed out in 1925, the dandy’s idleness is not ‘a natural disposition towards under-achievement, but a philosophically determined lack of realisation’ . This attitude makes financial independence a necessity for him – a necessity, however, that he is able to meet only rarely. Starting with a small inheritance of thirty thousand pounds – the confines of which initially proved the makings of his dandyism, as the art of dandyism, and indeed ‘good taste’ , is ultimately one of reduction, of creating principles appropriate to one’s means – Brummell eventually tended to lose money at the gaming tables of Brooks’s and White’s instead of augmenting his fortune. And so fate caught up with him. He paradoxically entered his declining years when he got the first job of his life. In order to help him to pay off his debts, the Duke of Wellington managed to have Brummell appointed British Consul in Caen in 1826 (he had already been in exile in Calais for ten years at this stage). But the required repayments were vastly disproportionate
Above Irena Sedlecká’s statue of Beau Brummell, 2002, in Jermyn Street. Photograph Neil Setchfield/ Alamy Stock Photo.
Opposite A dandy surrounded by the paraphernelia of his art: Massimiliano Mocchia di Coggiola’s The Broken Bow, 2016, a reworking of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, 1514.
